In Workplace Jazz, the author raises a battle cry for individual and corporate responsibility in building cultures that are healthier and more productive for those working in them. What should leaders do to address this workforce engagement and productivity gap? Should companies keep implementing culture improvement processes and procedures that do not address the emotional connection that teams need? Workplace Jazz offers a step-by-step process, enhanced with stories, neuroscience research, case studies, metaphors, and a strategic blueprint for developing connected and high-performing project teams based on the author’s experiences as a professional musician, certified conversational intelligence coach, and certified business consultant.

Addressing both renowned theories and standard applications, Stories of Life in the Workplace explains how stories affect human practices and organizational life. Authors Larry Browning and George H. Morris explore how we experience, interpret, and personalize narrative stories in our everyday lives, and how these communicative acts impact our social aims and interactions. In pushing the boundaries of how we perceive narrative and organization, the authors include stories that are broadly applicable across all concepts and experiences. With a perception of narrative and its organizational application, chapters focus on areas such as pedagogy, therapy, project management, strategic planning, public communication, and organizational culture. Readers will learn to: differentiate and gain an in-depth understanding of perspectives from varying narrators; recognize how stories are constructed and used in organizations, and modify the stories they tell; view stories as a means to promote an open exchange of creativity. By integrating a range of theories and practices, Browning and Morris write for an audience of narrative novices and scholars alike. With a distinctive approach and original insight, Stories of Life in the Workplace shows how individuality, developing culture, and the psychology of the self are constructed with languagee"and how the acceptance of onee(tm)s self is accomplished by reaffirming and rearranging onee(tm)s story.

Success is elusive. That's the conclusion a lot of people have come to. When one dream of success is realized, another takes shape on a distant horizon. Our thinking about success is often driven by what we don't have. It's driven by an obsessive striving for something more, something out there, something that never seems to come. Jazzthink: Playing with the Stuff of Success is not another set of rules for achieving that kind of success. It takes you within, to the true source of your successes. It encourages you to play with the unique talents of your brilliance. Jazzthink: Playing with the Stuff of Success focuses on the basic elements of deeply satisfying success that we already enjoy. It invites you to grow down into your true genius and find success in expressing your unique brilliance. Jazzthink: Playing with the Stuff of Success provokes you to think differently. It challenges you to imagine contributing your unique talents to a great jazz performance. It deals with genius, audiences, confidence, core charts, performance, focus and appreciation. These are the seven basic elements of deeply satisfying success. You find them deep within, itching to be expressed. And the result in your everyday life is sheer delight.

This book brings together contributions from researchers within various social science disciplines who seek to redefine the methods and topics that constitute the study of work. They investigate work activity in ways that do not reduce it to a 'psychology' of individual cognition nor to a 'sociology' of societal structures and communication. A key theme in the material is the relationship between theory and practice. This is not an abstract problem of interest merely to social scientists. Rather, it is discussed as an issue that working people address when they attempt to understand a task and communicate its demands. Mindful practices and communicative interaction are examined as situated issues at work in the reproduction of communities of practice in a variety of settings including: courts of law, computer software design, the piloting of airliners, the coordination of air traffic control, and traffic management in underground railway systems.

What Duke Ellington and Miles Davis teach us about leadership How do you cope when faced with complexity and constant change at work? Here’s what the world’s best leaders and teams do: they improvise. They invent novel responses and take calculated risks without a scripted plan or a safety net that guarantees specific outcomes. They negotiate with each other as they proceed, and they don’t dwell on mistakes or stifle each other’s ideas. In short, they say “yes to the mess” that is today’s hurried, harried, yet enormously innovative and fertile world of work. This is exactly what great jazz musicians do. In this revelatory book, accomplished jazz pianist and management scholar Frank Barrett shows how this improvisational “jazz mind-set” and the skills that go along with it are essential for effective leadership today. With fascinating stories of the insights and innovations of jazz greats such as Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins, as well as probing accounts of the wisdom gleaned from his own experience as a jazz musician, Barrett introduces a new model for leading and collaborating in organizations. He describes how, like skilled jazz players, leaders need to master the art of unlearning, perform and experiment simultaneously, and take turns soloing and supporting each other. And with examples that range from manufacturing to the military to high-tech, he illustrates how organizations must take an inventive approach to crisis management, economic volatility, and all the rapidly evolving realities of our globally connected world. Leaders today need to be expert improvisers. Yes to the Mess vividly shows how the principles of jazz thinking and jazz performance can help anyone who leads teams or works with them to develop these critical skills, wherever they sit in the organization. Engaging and insightful, Yes to the Mess is a seminar on collaboration and complexity, against the soulful backdrop of jazz.

How an individual responds to crises and critical incidents at work, both immediately and subsequent to the event, is heavily influenced both by personality characteristics and their use of coping strategies. These can, in turn, be affected by levels of education, gender and even the profession within which the individual is working. Coping, Personality and the Workplace offers theory, research and practice on our ability to cope with dangerous situations, critical incidents or other work crises. The chapters include perspectives on social and health habits and risks; gender and age differences as well as a range of different sources of threat: financial, psychological and physical; those within and outside the individual’s control; immediate and chronic. For organizations, this collection provides help and advice to build into employee safety and support programmes; for policy makers, a sense of the emerging sources of risk related to occupational health and for researchers, an anthology of original applied research from some of the leading authors in three continents.

To succeed at work, first you need to understand your own brain If you're in a job interview, how should you think about the mindset of the interviewer? If you've just been promoted, how do you handle the tensions of managing former peers? And what are the telltale mental signs that it's time to start planning your next career move? We know that psychology can teach us much about behaviors and challenges relevant to work, such as making better decisions, influencing people, and dealing with stress. But many popular books on these topics analyze them as universal human phenomena without providing real-life, constructive career help. Bring Your Brain to Work changes all that. Professor, author, and popular radio host Art Markman focuses on three essential elements of a successful career--getting a job, excelling at work, and finding your next position--and expertly illustrates how cognitive science, especially psychology, sheds fascinating and useful light on each of these elements. To succeed at a job interview, for example, you need to understand the mindset of the interviewer and know how to come across as exactly the individual the company wants to hire. To keep that job, it's critical to master the mental challenge of learning every day. Finally, careers require constant development, so you need to be able to sense when it's time to move up or out and to prepare yourself for the move. So many of the hurdles you face throughout your career are, first and foremost, psychological challenges, and Markman shows you how to use your different mental systems--motivational, social, and cognitive--to manage them more effectively. Integrating the latest research with engaging stories and examples from across the professional spectrum, Bring Your Brain to Work gets inside your head, helping you to succeed through a better understanding of yourself and those around you.

Learn how to make decisions in the face of increasingly complex and multifaceted challenges In A Symphony of Choices: How Mentorship Taught a Manager Decision-Making, Project Management and Workplace Engagement -- and Saved a Concert Season, workplace culture and strategy expert Gerald Leonard delivers a fascinating narrative following one Jerry Hall, the new Symphony Orchestra manager at a prestigious symphony concerned about the challenging plans for an upcoming season. In the book, you’ll watch Jerry connect with a former college professor and learn the skills necessary to successfully manage his way through these unprecedented times in his business and personal life. Does he have all skills necessary for effective decision-making and managing a major symphony’s portfolio of projects? Will his fear of succumbing to daunting challenges prevent him from succeeding? The author answers these questions, and more. You’ll also find: Hands-on strategies for decision-making and management you can implement today at your organization Methods for navigating an increasingly complex and interconnected environment Ways to apply subject-matter knowledge to your management even in the face of extraordinary personal challenges A necessary and hands-on resource for directors, managers, executives, and other business leaders, A Symphony of Choices will also earn a place on the bookshelves of practicing and aspiring leaders in athletic, academic, military, and other environments.

Remote working is the new reality, and transactional work – provided by freelancers, contract employees or consultants – has increased exponentially. It is forecast that as much as half the labor force will be working independently and virtually by 2020.Most organizations are still grappling with how to effectively manage their virtual staff and how to effectively support and motivate them – an increasingly urgent task as more Millennials join the workforce, bringing changed attitudes to work satisfaction. This book, the fruit of the author’s three decades of experience planning and implementing remote working environments, provides expert guidance for anyone planning a shift to remote working, managing teams of teleworkers, or themselves working in a virtual team.Working Virtually is for the executive leading changes in an enterprise that is preparing for virtual work or seeking to improve current performance. It offers tools to assess readiness, advice on creating appropriate reward policies, and strategies to adapt performance management processes to be more team-driven and technology leveraged. Working Virtually is written to and for the virtual leader who wants to establish high performing virtual teams. It provides an understanding of the roles and responsibilities of managing a virtual team, offering a wealth of advice on creating the conditions for collaboration, motivating team members, and identifying and defusing problems.Working Virtually is for the professional who works remotely from home, on the road, or in an office with remote colleagues. It is for anyone who wants to succeed in this new work environment by developing skills and networks to create a sustained and satisfying career path.With this new edition providing a 360° view of the roles and objectives of all stakeholders in the virtual workspace, this book uniquely provides readers with a rounded picture of the policies, processes, work habits, and commitments needed to achieve the shared goal of high performance remote teams.